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With no planned walk-up cold weather shelter, Orange County officials are moving forward with a pilot program that will give families with young kids vouchers to stay at a motel or hotel during the winter.
In recent years, local elected officials and public sector executives have waited well into the cold winter months to figure out where people living in the streets in OC can go for a walk-up shelter.
[Read: Santana: A Colder Side To OC]
While this current proposal doesn’t necessarily address the walk-up shelter issue, Orange County Second District Supervisor Vicente Sarmiento, in partnership with the nonprofit Families Forward, is launching a $200,000 program to help vulnerable families in his district stay warm and sheltered.
Sarmiento’s district includes the cities of Santa Ana and parts of Anaheim, Garden Grove, Orange as well as Tustin
On Tuesday, supervisors voted unanimously in support of Sarmiento’s proposal.
“We feel really optimistic about this pilot program for district two families that have children that are housing insecure,” Sarmiento said. “This is a very, very small effort relative to the need, but we have to start somewhere.”
Funding for the program will come from Sarmiento’s second district discretionary funds and will also go towards food assistance and administration of the program, which is set to run until April 30.
Sarmiento said the program will allow kids and families to stay safe and continue to make it to school and hopes it will evolve to reach more people who are homeless.
“Hopefully this evolves into making sure that everybody, every member of our community that’s housing compromised and having challenges will have an opportunity to have some place of shelter during a difficult weather experience,” he said.
In a news release Tuesday, Sarmiento also said Families Forward will try and connect these families to longer term housing resources and that local schools will help find families in need and invite them to utilize the program.
“When cold weather is expected, the families can be contacted and placed in hotels or motels, in the city where the children attend school, for a minimum of two nights. They will also be provided with transportation and food assistance,” reads the news release.
The program comes after a new county report found that 5.9% of students enrolled in public school in the 2022-23 school year were home insecure – up from 5.6% the previous year.
That means that about 27,000 kids were either sleeping in parks, living in motels, in a homeless shelter or in most cases doubled up with other families in one house.
[Read: Thousands of OC Kids Struggle With Homelessness, Hunger and Mental Health Issues]
It also comes after officials in at least eight cities across OC have been cracking down on encampments on public sidewalks and parks – with elected leaders in Stanton declaring homelessness a local emergency.
[Read: The Year of Homeless Camp Crackdowns in Orange County]
The crackdown comes after a Supreme Court ruling earlier this year overturned a decision that required cities to have shelter beds available for people before police or code enforcement officers could clear out a homeless camp.
Dying on The Streets of OC; A Rise in Homelessness
Year after year as officials wait till the 11th hour to figure out where people will be sheltered in the winter, homeless people continue to die.
Last year, the Orange County Sheriff’s department also released a report that showed 496 people died living on the streets of OC in 2022 – 25.6% from 2021.
While the latest Sheriff’s report reflects data two years old, Father Dennis Kriz of St. Philip Benizi Catholic Church in Fullerton usually publishes a monthly list in the Voice of OC of the names of homeless people who passed away.
According to Kriz’s latest update, 378 homeless people died in Orange County between Dec. 1, 2023 to Nov. 30, 2024.
Kriz spoke in support of the hotel voucher proposal at Tuesday’s supervisor meeting and called for supervisors to look into creating a similar program for others in the county.
“Let’s make this work. Let’s see other things like this and when you get done with this work on the seniors too. There’s several 100 seniors on the street as well,” he said.
The Orange County Register Editorial Board has also applauded the proposal.
Meanwhile, more people are becoming homeless in Orange County.
County officials last May announced a nearly 2,000-person increase in Orange County’s homeless population since 2022, saying there was a bottleneck at local shelters due to a lack of affordable housing in the region.
[Read: Orange County Homeless Population Continues Growing]
According to the latest homeless count, there are 7,322 homeless people in Orange County and 4,137 of them are unsheltered.
Hosam Elattar is a Voice of OC reporter and corps member with Report for America, a GroundTruth initiative. Contact him at helattar@voiceofoc.org or on Twitter @ElattarHosam.
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